As much as my Macbook is a nice computer to use, the majority of the work I do is on Windows, so why waste a nice Dual Core machine when I can run Windows on it. I didn’t want to go the dual boot option, mainly because I want to switch between Safari and Windows to test some web pages. With this in mind I purchased the Parallels virtual machine software. It ran XP really well but most of the software failed the pre-requisites checks since the meagre 512Mb of memory meant that XP could only have 128Mbs, not the greatest set-up ever. What was I to do? I collected my 2x1Gb sticks this morning and set about installing them. Looking at the previous Mac laptops the feat of installing new memory was quite a task. But now they’re using Intel it seems that finally Apple’s near facist attitude to its users doing anything to their machines is slowly dissolving. The tasks consisted of:
- taking the battery pack out – easy
- unscrewing a metal retaining bracket – a little tricky since you need a short screw driver
- free the memory by pushing the retaining arm – a bit of a sweat since it takes a nerve racking amount of brute force
- change the sticks
- push the new sticks until they don’t go any further
- attempt to put the retain bracket back on – fiddly but doable
So not only do we get a nice cool dual core Intel chip, we get some user friendly configuration options too.
Also just spotted that Parallels are beta testing a new version that runs individual Windows applications to look like they’re OSX applications with copy and pasting files and other "seemless" interoperation, plus it looks like Boot Camp is going nowhere.
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